By JIMMY VIELKIND, Capitol bureau

Published 10:20 pm, Thursday, December 22, 2011

ALBANY — The state task force charged with drawing new legislative districts will not count 58,237 state prison inmates in their jail cells, and will instead reassign 46,003 of them to other addresses in the state when it draws new political lines, according to an agreement announced late Thursday.

The dispute over exactly how to count the prisoners has snarled the once-a-decade process of redistricting, and delayed efforts by LATFOR, the state panel controlled jointly by Republicans in charge of the Senate and Democrats who dominate the Assembly, to release its draft maps.

The reassignment is mandated by a 2010 law, which was enacted by Democrats. Senate Republicans have claimed the law is unconstitutional because it in effect creates a secondary Census by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. An Albany County-based judge rejected their lawsuit, but lawyers said they are still pressing an appeal to the Court of Appeals, state's highest court.

Moving where the prisoners are counted dilutes the power of upstate, rural areas that generally elect Republicans to the benefit of downstate urban areas that tend to elect Democrats. This shift is particularly important in the state Senate, where Republicans are trying to maintain a 32-seat majority. It will be harder to hold onto upstate districts without the prison population.

The new process will exclude 12,234 prisoners, whose addresses were invalid, out-of-state or incomplete. A different reallocation of prisoners conducted in September by Assembly Democrats excluded only 3,709 inmates.

"We worked very hard to ensure that every prisoner who could be counted was counted," said Sen. Mike Nozzolio, R-Seneca County, who is LATFOR's Republican co-chair. "All people were counted in a way that was appropriate in compliance with the statute. This was a lot more difficult than it looked, in the sense there were no regulations or guidance."

Nozzolio's Democratic counterpart, Assemblyman Jack McEneny of Albany, said that under the Assembly's analysis some incomplete addresses were supplemented, unlike the new analysis. The inmates with incomplete addresses within cities like New York City were then excluded, he explained, because they could not be reassigned to the nearest Census block, as would be required. However, since towns are not usually divided in the course of redistricting, inmates whose partial address could be accurately assigned to a town were moved.

"As we speak, this is going through the computerized system and changing the count for every block and every town that has prisoners assigned to it," McEneny said.

A draft set of maps for the state Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives seats could be available early next year, he said, and another round of public hearings will be scheduled.

Much uncertainty still surrounds LATFOR's efforts on redistricting, which has been derided as an "incumbent protection program" by good-government groups. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has said he is not convinced legislators should be allowed to draw districts for themselves, and threatened to veto LATFOR's lines. Such a move would likely put redistricting in the hands of a judge.